Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Barbara A. Mowat (essay date 1977)
Barbara A. Mowat (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "Images of Women in Shakespeare's Plays." Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XI, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 145-57.
[In the following essay, Mowat examines the discrepancy between reader and audience perception of Shakespeare's women characters and the ways in which Shakespeare's male characters view those same women.]
When we look carefully at the image of woman presented in Shakespeare's plays, we realize that what we are in fact seeing is a set of images superimposed one on the other. The first image is that created primarily by what Shakespeare's heroines actually say and do within their plays. This image is remarkably unbiased, sexually; that is, in terms of his female characters' words and actions, they are not stereotypically "female," but show the same range of human strengths and weaknesses as do his males. It is to this image of woman that Juliet Dusinberre is, I think, responding when she...
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